


Interludes

by Fiorenza_a



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:49:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2106987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiorenza_a/pseuds/Fiorenza_a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Affairs of the heart...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interludes

  


Waiting for a loyal Russian of unpredictable temperament had long since become a habit. Napoleon now struggled to remember how it had been when the men to whom he had owed his life and who, in turn, had owed theirs to him had been reliably, resolutely American.

Men who had never missed a cultural nuance because they had breathed them in with their first lungfuls of air. Men who'd attended schools like his and who had stories like his of punishments like his, for reading comics like his, by teachers like his, in lessons like his.

They'd peddled bikes like his and had been enthralled by the same programmes as his. Men who had only told him tales of how their Grandmother or Great Grandmother had learned to speak English and for whom the old country was a sepia tinted neverland, existing only in an old lady's lavender pomandered recollections of a childhood begun in another century. Men who had never been delightedly bemused by the concept of a cupcake.

Men like himself who were equally unflinching whether faced by the dastardly attentions of THRUSH or the sincere attentions of a woman. Men who didn't head for the nearest fire escape at the first sign of a feminine heart aflame.

Men who wouldn't keep him waiting at the top of a flight of sweeping stone steps, while they stood at the bottom in jasmine scented moonlight whispering shy goodbyes to a woman who had tended their wounds and listened to their delirium.

Men whose kisses weren't as much reticence as they were tenderness.

Napoleon turned away to allow Illya his privacy, to allow him to share what he could of his heart with the gentle soul who had touched it.

 

≈

 

Napoleon was a work of art, an artisanship as evocative of his homeland as apple pie and coffee. A polished stone of impervious beauty. A man who had never been given cause to doubt his world and therefore had never doubted himself.

A man for whom overabundance was invisible and for whom hunger was a product of poverty not scarcity. A man who hadn't fledged phoenix like from the weary and weed strewn rubble of still proud cities. An American.

He walked with the unbowed confidence of a New World, unhindered by enmities and allegiances so old that those who had been trespassed against and those who had sinned had rotted to dust beneath their forgotten crowns centuries ago.

A country for whom the coming millennium would be a novelty, whose church bells had not rung in the last.

And yet for all that Napoleon's was an old soul.

Under the quick smile and easy manner was the loneliness of a man who had a heart to give but had outlived the courage to give it.

Illya watched his partner from behind the cover of dark glasses and a large newspaper as Napoleon handed back the gift of love on a sun soaked railway platform. Exchanging it for the soft touch of wistful lips and the lingering memory of perfumed hair even darker than his own.

Illya looked on unabashed as Napoleon stared after the departing train. Perhaps not the first American who had added the zest of bitter-sweet regret to the celebration of his independence, but the last American who would ever be brought to admit it. Napoleon turned back, meeting Illya's steady gaze with dark eyes full of gentle melancholy and said ''I'm very tired Illya, let's go home.''

  


END


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